Entities in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

In this article, we will see what entity is, different types of entities and how to identify entities in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

What is an entity

An entity is an abstraction from the physical implementation of database tables. It is a combination of multiple tables where you can combine data from multiple sources or single source. It has structure like your database table such as fields, index, calculated columns.

Types of entities in Dynamics 365 F&O

• Standard entity – Standard entities are developed by Microsoft and if you want to add or modify then you need to create an extension.
• Composite entity. Composite entity is allowing you to build a single entity by leveraging multiple entities that are related to each other. The concept is heavily used in scenarios where an entity can be represented as a single document, like Sales header/line, Invoice header/line and Vendor Catalog.
• Custom entity – Custom entity allows to build/ develop according to your business need.
• Virtual entity – Virtual Entity allows you to represent data from external systems natively in Dynamics without the data actually residing in the database. 

Types of entities in Dynamics 365 CE

• Standard entity – Standard entities are developed by Microsoft and it can be used for general purpose.
• Activity Type entity – A special type of entity which is used to store all the interaction with the customer and have special party list attributes like From, Sender, Regarding… etc.
• Virtual entity – Virtual Entity allows you to represent data from external systems natively in Dynamics without the data actually residing in the database. 

How to identify entities in Power Platform

Type	Prefix	Example
Virtual entity	mserp_	Mserp_hcmworkerentity
Dataverse/cds entity	cdm_	cdm_worker

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